Konnect Reference Platform

The Konnect Reference Platform is a technical guide that helps you integrate Kong Konnect into your engineering organization and API delivery process.

The platform offers an opinionated framework for designing your Konnect organization and helping to build a Federated APIOps delivery process including governance, auditing, and GitOps based automations.

Included in the platform are tools, examples, best practices, and documentation. How you choose to use the platform depends on your organization’s needs. You can use the materials in these pages as a source for ideas in your own API management systems, or you can use the tools and how-to guide provided to fully deploy your own Konnect Reference Platform instance.

 
flowchart LR
   A@{ label: " Platform Team
(APIOps)"}
   B@{ shape: processes, label: " Developer Teams"}
   subgraph Kong
   C( Konnect)
   D( Kong Gateway)
   end

    B -->|reads APIs| A
    A -->|configures| Kong
    C <--> D

  

The documentation in the following pages provide extensive details on how the Konnect Reference Platform works and how to use it. Before diving in fully, this overview provides the high level concepts and design. The platform makes some general assumptions about how your engineering organization is structured and the types of automations you may wish to use. If these assumptions do not fit your needs, you can still use the materials as a reference for building your own specialized API delivery platform.

Platform Team: The Platform Team is a common enginering organization design, where a team owns the platform upon which
development teams deploy their applications. In the reference platform, the platform team owns the API delivery process and the supporting code and automations to enable it.

Development Teams: The Development Teams own the application services and APIs. In the current version of the reference platform, they are isolated from Kong services and the API delivery process. The platform team sources API specifications from the development teams and delivers them to Konnect on their behalf.

Organizations & Environments: The reference platform supports multiple organizations and environments. Organizations are are used to associate a set of teams and their applications to a Konnect Organization. Within each organization, you can define environments which represent a further logical grouping of Konnect resources. By default, “Development” and “Production” environments are created for each organization.

APIOps: In the reference platform, APIs are delivered from the development teams to Konnect and Kong Gateway following APIOps & GitOps based principles. Pull Requests and review based processes are used to provide automations with governance procedures ensuring auditable and repeatble API delivery.

Declarative Config: The reference platform is designed around a declarative configuration format that is used to define your desired state of Konnect resources. Within the APIOps process, koctl reads and reconciles the declarative configuration and applies it to a Konnect organization.

Konnect Orchestrator (koctl): The koctl tool is a multi-purpose CLI tool used to enable the features of the reference platform. You can use the tool to initialize your platform repository, install the APIOps workflows, and apply declarative configuration to your Konnect organizations. By default koctl runs within the APIOps workflows of the platform repository.

 
flowchart LR
  A( koctl)
  subgraph platform [Platform Team Repository]
  B( declarative config)
  C@{ shape: processes, label: " APIOps Workflows
(koctl)"}
  end
  D( Konnect)
  subgraph service [Development Team Repositories]
  E@{ shape: processes, label: " Code Repositories"}
  F@{ shape: docs, label: "OpenAPI Specs"}
  end

   A -->|configures| platform
   B <-->|PRs| C
   C -->|applies changes| D
   E --- F
   F -->|reads| C

  

The Konnect Reference Platform is designed as a versatile reference for helping you build an API delivery platform that suits your specific organization. Engineering organizations are unique in their needs, and no single solution will be a perfect fit for every environment.

The platform contains various materials that can be used indivdiually or together to build a complete API delivery platform. You may start by simply reviewing the documentation, code, and APIOps workflows provided and apply the concepts to your own systems. Alternatively, you may choose to fully use the Konnect Orchestrator and build your own API Platform based on the tools and guidance provided in the platform how-to guide.

The following sections provide details on the various components and how to use them.

See the full FAQ page for more questions and answers.